Charles R. Helm worked at the Walker Art Center for 17, most recently as Music Consultant for Performing Arts department from 1983 to 1991. From 1991 until 2017, he was Director of Performing Arts at the Wexner Center for the Arts. There, Helm organized creative residency and commissioning projects for such as artists as Young Jean Lee, Improbable Theater, Bill T. Jones, SITI Company, Bebe Miller, Bill Frisell, The Builders Association, Akram Khan, The Wooster Group, Savion Glover, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Kronos Quartet, among many others. He co-curated the 1999 Wexner Center exhibition Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire, the first major retrospective exhibition of one of today’s foremost stage innovators, which subsequently toured nationally. In 2009 he curated the first US exhibition of the gallery-based video, installation, and performance installation work of vanguard choreographer William Forsythe. Helm writes and lectures on the arts and has regularly served as a panelist for local, regional, and national agencies and foundations including the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and Japan Foundation, among others.
Oozing with Cool: Minnesota Music Legend Tony Glover at the Walker
Charles Helm, former Walker music consultant and longtime director of Performing Arts at the Wexner Center for the Arts, remembers Tony Glover, an icon in Minneapolis’s West Bank blues scene, who passed away this week at age 79, and his impact at the Walker.
